Tag: aridity
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The Water Crises Aren’t Coming—They’re Here
For eons, the earth has had the same amount of water—no more, no less. What the ancient Romans used for crops and Nefertiti drank? It’s the same stuff we bathe with. Yet with more than seven billion people on the planet, experts now worry we’re running out of usable water. The symptoms are here: multiyear…
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Radiokrypton dating plumbs mysteries of water aquifers
Argonne physicist Peter Mueller and his colleagues are selectively capturing and counting rare isotopes of krypton to determine the age of ice and groundwater. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory We tap it, pump it and draw it from below the surface of every imaginable landscape, from desert to well-manicured suburban yard. It is the one essential…
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To Save Their Water Supply, Colorado Farmers Taxed Themselves
A sign advertising a water sale sits on a farm outside Del Norte, Colorado. The Western U.S. is just starting to recover after a prolonged, 16-year drought. A lack of water can force people to take a hard look at how they use it, and make big changes. That’s what happened in southern Colorado, where…
